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Goran Strandberg Nonet: Monks Mood
by Florence Wetzel
Twentieth-century jazz offered bountiful gifts that musicians will continue to mine for, well, as long as people play jazz. One gift is pianist Thelonious Monk's compositions, which are surely among the music's most original and appealing; as Past Daily states, you can never get too much Monk in your diet. Another gift is the nonet format ...
Did Stan Kenton Swing? You Bet Your Walkin' Shoes He Did...
by Jack Bowers
I've been listening to a lot of Stan Kenton's music recently while coming to grips with the age-old question, did the Kenton orchestra really swing? The answer, to me, is a no-brainer: Yes, Kenton swung. Liberally and often. [Note: This of course depends on how “swinging" is defined; opinions may vary]. In his own way--although he'd ...
Herbie Mann: An Amalgamation of Everything
by Bob Kenselaar
[Flauist Herbie Mann was often ahead of the trend with his wide explorations into sounds from everywhere. When I asked him in this 1978 interview where music in general was heading, he talked about a broad mix--"an amalgamation of everything"--which might be a good way to describe Mann's overall career, except that it doesn't account for ...
SuperSax Me
by Jack Bowers
Back in the early 1970s bassist Buddy Clark and saxophonist Med Flory conceived a brilliant idea: to form a group (primarily a reed section with rhythm) that would use orchestrated arrangements of saxophonist Charlie Parker's transcendent bop solos as the basis for its music. As for a name, nothing less than SuperSax would suffice. The nine-piece ...
Stan Kenton-NOVA Jazz Orchestra / Baker's Dozen Big Band / Danny D'Imperio and the Bloviators
by Jack Bowers
Stan Kenton Orchestra / NOVA Jazz OrchestraDouble Feature, Vol. 2Tantara Productions2012 One of the more difficult aspects of reviewing Tantara's series of impressive salutes to Stan Kenton and his music is knowing where to begin. As on Volume 1 of the label's Double Feature (with Volume 3 ...
In Memoriam: 2011
As 2011 comes to a close, I'd like to take some time to remember some of the great contributors to jazz that passed away in 2011. Here is a short list of some of the wonderful musicians we lost over the last year. Charles Fambrough, 60 Bassist Charles Fambrough died on January 1, 2011. He had ...
Catching Up
by Jack Bowers
As our most recent column was devoted exclusively to the Ken Poston / LAJI event, “Modern Sounds," held October 20-24 at the Los Angeles Marriott Airport Hotel, and to the day-long tribute to bandleader Stan Kenton on the hundredth anniversary of his birth that followed, a number of substantive items slipped through the cracks. Before they ...
"Modern Sounds," or: Running a Marathon in Full Body Armor
by Jack Bowers
From October 19-25 Betty and I were at the Los Angeles Marriott Airport Hotel to attend Modern Sounds, the L.A. Jazz Institute's four-day salute to West Coast jazz, followed by a day-long tribute to Stan Kenton on the hundredth anniversary of the legendary bandleader's birth. We arrived a day early to be primed and ready for ...
Pete Rugolo (1915-2011)
Pete Rugolo, a jazz-classical maverick in the late-1940s andarchitect of a brassy, West Coast orchestral sound that helped establish Stan Kenton and the music of television and the movies in the 1950s and 1960s, died on October 16 in Sherman Oaks, Calif. He was 95. [Photo by William P. Gottlieb] Starting in 1944 with his first ...
Jeff Sultanof on Pete Rugolo
Shortly after Pete Rugolo died this week, Jeff Sultanof offered to contribute a piece putting Rugolo's work in perspective. I was delighted to accept and flattered that he considered Rifftides the proper place for his essay. Jeff is a native of New York City, where he lives and works. He is a composer, orchestrator, editor, educator ...
